Abstract
Rarely does research in the history and philosophy of science lead to new empirical results, but that is exactly what has happened in one of the essays of this special issue: Rang and Grebe-Ellis have developed new experimental techniques to perform measurements Goethe proposed 217 years ago. These measurements fit neatly with Goethe’s idea of polarity—his complementary spectrum is not only an optical, but also a thermodynamical counterpart of Newton’s spectrum. I use the new measurements, firstly, to argue against the asymmetries between light and darkness posited by Lyre and Schreiber; and, secondly, to explicate the alternative theory (the heterogeneity of darkness) that Goethe had introduced to urge scientific pluralism. In my replies to exegetical criticism by Böhler, Hampe and Zemplén, I show that the main goal of Goethe’s Farbenlehre was indeed to expose symmetries between light and darkness. Furthermore, I argue that it is worthwhile to focus on the experiments, arguments and hypotheses of the Farbenlehre, and not merely on rhetorical, narrative or stylistical aspects, as Böhler and Hampe would have it. Goethe’s criticism of Newton is often dismissed, but it is in fact surprisingly relevant today.
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Notes
I will explicate the theory in more detail in the last section of this essay.
I will quote Lyre’s objection in the next section. An objection along these lines could have been put forward in Goethe’s days, as the energetic effects of light were already known then (Falkenburg 2015, 577–8).
A detailed exegetical discussion of this passage and related ones lies beyond the scope of this essay. But I want to mention one fact that has been overlooked by many of Goethe’s readers: Goethe used ten of the seventeen plates of the Farbenlehre to illustrate his research programme of inverting optical experiments.
Even our modern concept of energy did not emerge until after 1840 (Fox 1974, 130, 132).
Goethe’s ideas were inspired by a thought of Kepler’s, which Goethe translated and commented on with approval (Goethe 1947–/I.6, 157–8).
In future work, I will offer a much more detailed case in favour of my interpretation. My exegetical considerations will take into account the linguistic turn, the experimental turn, the iconic turn and the rhetorical turn, but of course they will also be based on a close reading of Goethe’s texts. See Müller (2019).
In the English translation these are colour plates VII and VIII, following p. 206 in Goethe (1988b).
Similar but more abstract considerations are offered by Hampe (2018, section 2).
Several schemata in Goethe’s scientific legacy show the importance Goethe and his companions placed on applying the idea of polarity in many different areas (Goethe 1947–/I.3, 354–5, 382–3, 502–3).
Contrary to what Böhler (2018, section 3) says, I did not call theoretical use of language deficient, and neither did I attribute such a claim to Goethe. In passing, another misunderstanding has to be clarified: The notion of a rotten compromise (with its drastic moral implications) does not occur in my book; the accurate English translation of the German expression “fauler Kompromiss” is, of course, “poor compromise”.
Before Goethe turns to the sensory-moral effects of colour at the end of the didactic part (Goethe 1988b, §758–§920), he summarises his scientific considerations with a section entitled “Concluding Observation on Language and Terminology” (Goethe 1988b, §751–§757; emphasis changed). Here, he once more states the main goal of the Farbenlehre and this time explicitly says how the polar terminology from other perceptual areas should be applied to the realm of colours: “Scientists have obviously felt that it would be necessary and suitable to use a figurative language […], for the formula of polarity has been borrowed from magnetism and extended to electricity, etc. The concepts of plus and minus, which represent this formula, have found suitable application to many a phenomenon […] We, too, have long wished to introduce the term polarity into the theory of color, and the present work will show our justification and purpose in doing so” (Goethe 1988b, §756–§757, emphasis there). For considerations pointing in the same direction, also see Goethe (1988b, §453).
Böhler’s interpretation does not accord with the paragraphs in the didactic section quoted in the previous footnote, which have to be read as a summary of what has been achieved so far: on the one hand, Goethe once again talks of language, symbols, etc.; on the other, he makes these leitmotifs concrete by explicitly speaking of polarity instead of using polar examples to implicitly gesture at the notion.
Ten years after publishing the Farbenlehre, Goethe regretfully spoke of the battle in the sciences (Goethe 1947–/I.8, 62). But he did not retreat from his position, and 2 years later he published a list of his “adversaries” (Goethe 1947–/I.8, 202–204). Furthermore, there are several passages in which Goethe comes across as veritably pugnacious, particularly in his Tame Invectives [see e.g. V. Zahme Xenie (Goethe 1947–/I.3, 342)].
See e.g. Richard Friedenthal’s use of “fight” and similar expressions (Friedenthal 2010, 285, 286, 287, 290, 291). Even before the first world war, Albert Bielschowsky’s biography featured “mines” that Goethe was “prepared to explode” and a “war” that Goethe was “determined and compelled” to have (Bielschowsky 1907, 204, 207). And Emil Ludwig used expressions such as “campaign against Newton”, “to wrestle”, “colour-antagonists” (Ludwig 1928, 291, 454). While the foregoing references stem from works first published in German, martial vocabulary appears in the Anglophone literature on Goethe, too. For example, the introduction of the Cambridge Companion to Goethe mentions that “he battled against Newtonian optics” (Sharpe 2002, 5). And the section on Goethe as a poet states that “he was also capable of expressing his most deeply held convictions (or prejudices) in the most coarse and brutal language” (Williams 2002, 58; my italics). Last but not least, Nicholas Boyle speaks of Goethe’s “hostility to Newton” (Boyle 2000, 100).
Nonetheless, Kuhn’s terminology may well help to explain why combative rhetoric is more common among philosophers than among scientists: in philosophy, any assumption can be doubted, which is why there are few (if any) universally accepted paradigms; many philosophers thus live, so to speak, in a permanent revolution. I think that the lack of undisputed paradigms is a good reason not to treat philosophy as a scientific discipline. See Müller (2017a, Section I).
Zemplén invokes Otto Neurath, whose views align just as well with Goethe’s philosophical insights as Quine’s views do. Quine was arguably influenced by Neurath.
An important component of the solution is the wavelength λ, which is a successor of the notion Newton called refrangibility but was unable to quantitatively employ. To measure it, Newton could have deposited a prototype prism in the Tower of London (analogously to the prototype metre in the Louvre): then he could have sent a homogenous ray of light through the prototype prism in a standardised geometrical setting and measured the result on a standardised screen; the outgoing angle could have been used as a measure for the refrangibility of the ray of light. Such a procedure was in the air in Newton’s times, but eventually unsuccessful because the results could not be transferred onto prisms of other materials. Shapiro shows where Newton got stuck in his attempt to mathematise the laws of refraction (Shapiro 1979, 127–8 et passim; also see Lohne 1961). Since Goethe’s year of death, Cauchy’s equation can be used to calculate arbitrary refractions, given the wavelength of the refracted light and the material constants of the optical medium (Smith et al. 2001, 3883–4). This calculation does not presuppose any non-classical physics. For the sake of simplicity, I will use neither wavelengths nor Newtonian refrangibilities, but rather the colours of light rays. I will further simplify matters by pretending that any ray of light is either blue (B), turquoise (T), green (G), yellow (Y) or red (R). A further law Newton could only specify qualitatively concerns the question of how much light is reflected at the boundary of two media and how much passes through the new medium (Newton 1964, 36–7). This law was also discovered in Goethe’s times (by Fresnel). In order to determine the relation of reflection and transmission, Newton would have had to measure not only wavelengths, but also intensities of light, which he did not. For our purposes, however, it seems appropriate to equip Newton with the notions of wavelenght and intensity.
Similar considerations are offered by Zemplén (2018, section 2.1).
Only a few years after Herschel’s discoveries, Wünsch managed to measure temperature increases in all visible areas of the spectrum; he seems to have used more sensitive thermometers (see e.g. Wünsch 1808, 606). From our current perspective, he was right to conclude from his measurements that light and heat cannot be separated from each other (Wünsch 1808, 629).
This point has to be taken with a grain of salt. In order to cover distant ranges of temperature and different demands of precision, we have to use quite diverse measurement devices, which are counted as “thermometers” because their results partially overlap, so that the ensuing patchwork can be consolidated in a single scale. The measurements of Rang and Grebe-Ellis illustrate this point: their measurement device is a pyroelectric radiation power meter. The calculated power densities (nW/mm2) can be depicted as a location-sensitive (and thus in a Newtonian spectrum: wavelength-dependent) curve, which is closely and monotonously tied to Herschel’s temperature curve. Just as with a traditional thermometer, measurements of the pyroelectric sensor are based on the fact that pyroelectric matter changes temperature as it absorbs radiation, which in turn changes the electrical charge on the electrodes. Because the sensor reacts to the most minute changes of temperature, the relevant spectral signals have to be filtered out of the random background radiation. Analysing the data thus requires computing power that has only become available in the past 50 years.
The hypothetical magnitude IP can be converted (one-by-one for each wavelength) into the standard magnitude I through suitable monotonous and continuous transformations. Newton’s theory does not require comparing the intensities of differently coloured homogenous light rays; because Newton held that the essence of a homogenous light ray never changes, one intensity function is enough for each kind of light. From today’s perspective, the energy transmitted by homogenous light per unit of time depends on the number of photons per unit of time and on their wavelength (and thus their refrangibility or colour); both components have an effect on temperature measurements. If the thermal output and wavelength of a homogenous light ray are known, its light intensity can be calculated via a transformation that takes into account the properties of the human eye (or any other detector).
Were it to meet the prism in dark surroundings, it would be decomposed into its orthodox components, and thus in light rays of all colours but green.
Goethe anticipated this. See Goethe (2016, §132).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editors for their patience, the contributors for far more critical and stimulating points than I could address here, the members of my HPS-colloquium for comments on an earlier and much too long version of my response, Matthias Rang and Johannes Grebe-Ellis for countless insights from physics—and Emanuel Viebahn for the English translation.
